How connected TV is transforming media investments in Canada

By Craig Hamm, VP, Broadcast Sales, MiQ 

The digital media world continues to drastically change in Canada. With more screens and fragmented attention than ever before, emerging TV trends are showing what channels marketers need to be investing in to better connect with their target audiences. 

Rinse and repeat strategies no longer address the changing nature of media, and we are seeing more Canadians move towards streaming advertising-based video-on-demand services (AVODs) and subscription video on-demand (SVODs). That’s why it’s so important that marketing investments include these channels in the media mix. 

We are especially seeing these trends permeate post-COVID. According to eMarketer, roughly $6 billion dollars was expected to be spent on connected TV at the U.S. upfronts. That’s roughly 17% of the entire TV upfront spend.* This is likely to resonate in Canada as pay TV households will drop below 50% of Canadian households in 2022, and almost 80% of Canadians are now ‘streaming’ their TV content.* 

In Canada, TV budgets and ad spend do not reflect the viewership landscape. Marketers might find it challenging to reach a growing and engaged audience in exchange for achieving grandfathered broadcast KPI’s not reflective of today’s market. But ignoring connected TV is like saving your cassettes and CD’s – the problem is…you can’t play them anywhere. That’s why being agile and flexible is  necessary to help drive media initiatives forward in the upcoming years. 

My suggestion for marketers looking to maximize connected TV outputs – continue to test and learn TV strategies for better insights, solutions and media outcomes. A company that is doing this really well is Subway Canada. 

Subway was looking to optimize their TV strategy by tapping into rich, connected digital and linear TV data. One of their main objectives was to increase the linear TV campaign reach, and driving the frequency of ads shown to their consumers. So we served up an Advanced TV campaign where we targeted non-exposed households with a Subway ad on connected TV, and balanced frequency by targeting ‘light TV viewers’ and cord cutters more heavily. We more than tripled message frequency against ‘light TV’ viewers by serving them ads on connected TV, reaching the audiences that Subway would have otherwise missed. We also extended Subways linear TV reach by an incremental 11.5% with connected TV audiences. This is an example of reaching as much of your addressable audience as possible in the most efficient way, which at the end of the day is one of the most fundamental challenges for marketers. 

References:

https://content-na1.emarketer.com/us-upfront-ctv-ad-spending-will-exceed-6-billion-this-year 

https://content-na1.emarketer.com/canada-households-pay-tv-2022